Inauguration of John Parker Compton Memorial Tournament; a boy who loved tennis

Allied troops were advancing in Italy, but the Nazis still held the Apennine Mountains, and suspected Allied sympathizers faced execution by the Germans. In hopes of rescuing a priest and a family who were in jeopardy, two young American paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines in March of 1945.

One was a teenager from Scarsdale, John Parker Compton. As he neared the priest’s church, a sniper shot and killed him. Later the Nazis killed the priest and burned his church.

After the war, the Compton family had the church rebuilt and a memorial plaque installed.

At home, John’s parents Randolph and Dorothy,created a living memorial to the boy who had played so much tennis at Fox Meadow Tennis Club, a tennis tournament for boys eighteen and under.

Paul Sullivan and his pal John Compton played many a game together. “Then John went off to Exeter,” Sullivan recalls, “and a year at Princeton before enlisting. My father, Paul Sullivan, Sr., and Randolph Compton jointly proposed to FMTC and the Scarsdale Recreation Department that such a tournament be established. It was quickly approved, and Randolph and Dorothy Compton established a trust fund to provide the funds necessary.”

Kitty Fuller chaired the first John Parker Compton Memorial Tournament, held at Fox Meadow on June 24, 1946. Sanctioned from the start by the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association, the tournament was open to ELTA registered Juniors from Westchester and nearby counties. The first winner lived in Brooklyn. As the entries grew, the Compton tournament had to be limited to Westchester boys under eighteen.

“This tournament thus became the first and only privately endowed USTA-sanctioned tournament in the country,” says Paul Sullivan, the permanent chairman.

Doubles matches were added to the competition in its fifth year, and a total of sixty singles competitors and twenty-one doubles teams entered. The competition has grown virtually every year and in 1976 broke all previous records, with ninety-eight singles entrants and fifty-three doubles teams. Over the years it has included such players as Bailey Brown, Buddy Gallagher, and Andrew Kohlberg, who is currently a tennis professional ranked in the top one hundred in the world. This event is Fox Meadow’s major contribution to Junior tennis development.

The June 1983 Compton tournament will be the thirty-eighth held. As it has each year, the program will carry these words:

“A Memorial Tournament in Memory of John Parker Compton, Pfc, 88th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division. A boy who loved tennis ..”

Source: Diana Reische, Fox Meadow Tennis Club – The First Hundred Years, 1983